5 Super Bowl secrets from watching in Japan

It took 16 hours of flights and train rides, but I discovered a simple truth:

The Super Bowl is much more interesting in Japan.

Spud Hilton / Bad Latitude

Sitting in a hotel room in Kyoto (because I couldn’t find a sake bar with the game on) I learned five things you didn’t know about watching the Super Bowl that you don’t learn unless you’re overseas.

1. Fewer distractions: On the NHK sports network, there were no commercials. Yes, not one of the zillion-dollar cutesy (and baffling) advertisements that are there solely to give people who don’t give a crap about football something to talk about at work tomorrow.

2. No brain-numbing blather: You quickly realize while listening to an entire telecast with Japanese commentators — understanding not a word of it — that you don’t really miss most of what the American commentators are saying. You can just watch the game. No one rally needs to know stuff like the quarterback’s third cousin, who held a state record in women’s curling in Minnesota, married a guy who runs a chain of hardware stores in the Midwest.

3. There’s a lot that happens while the U.S. is watching the commercials: I found a whole world of behind-the-scenes drama involving the coaches, the trainers and the crowd that you never get to see because the Go Daddy babies are drooling (almost as much as the morons who wrote the commercial).

4. There’s a lot not happening while the U.S. is watching the commercials: In case you hadn’t already figured it out, the network has absolutely no compunction about making a few hundred highly-paid players, coaches, trainers and media — not to mention 50,000 fans — sit around doing nothing so stockholders can make a few more bucks. It was interesting to watch the momentum of a drive grind to a sudden halt for the infamous “TV timeout.”

5. The real thing: As silly as it sounds, eliminating all the aforementioned distractions makes watching the Super Bowl from a hotel room in Japan about as close as you can come to actually being there — but without overpriced beer, souvenirs and bad food.

And come to think of it, considering what most of the “fans” paid for seats, it probably cost less to fly to (and stay in) Japan.